None of my banks have a YNAB connection. Salary account, savings, daily spending, a foreign currency account, a credit card. For years that meant typing everything in by hand, or exporting a CSV and reformatting it with a separate tool before I could import it.

Then I realised my banking apps were already telling me about every transaction, in real time, through notifications. If my phone knew about each payment, there had to be a way to hand it to YNAB.

The hard part was reading them. Every bank words its notifications differently, and some are very creative. I thought about using AI, but that would mean sending every notification to someone else's server to be read, and I didn't want that. So I built a small parsing engine instead, and a way to teach it: you tag the amount, the payee and the date in a real notification, and mark which parts are just noise.

After a few iterations, it could read every one of my banks.

I figured I wasn't the only one fighting this, so I put a test version in front of other people. They had setups I'd never thought of, and I spent about eight weeks adapting the app to them: new features, plus fixes for odd date and amount formats.

It's now on Google Play, as a one-time purchase after a free trial. It's also listed on YNAB's Works with YNAB page (https://api.ynab.com/#works-with-ynab-third-party). That's a list, not an endorsement, and I'm not affiliated with YNAB.

I'm the developer, happy to answer anything. If you've got unlinked accounts too, how are you getting them into YNAB today?

Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.notifsync.ynab

Website: https://www.notifsync.com/

On iPhone, latest OS, latest app, seems to pretty regularly freeze when entering a transaction. Either after I enter the amount or after I enter the Category, it just freezes. Have to close out app, retry, then it works. Anyone else experiencing this?

I rely heavily on sync instead of manual updates - automation makes al the difference in whether I can actually focus enough to use a softwrae like YNAB.

And with RBC, I have to reconnect every day, which was already painful.

But it just got way worse: now Plaid requires me to enter my userid and password for the bank every single time, and it won't fetch it from my password manager.

• So now I have to open the password manager, fetch that userid and password, validate that it's me trying to connect, etc.
  
• I was already calculating that I was losing hours each month to this syncing process, and this has doubled or tripled it. Especially because sometimes I lose attention mid-way through and don't respond to a notification, then RBC decides I'm suss and blocks me completely and creates even more hoops.
• Plus the sync is now often incomplete, so I'm having to make adjustments and/or do a bunch of extra work.
  
• The part that bugs me the most is that processes like these are positioned like they are to protect security. But it actually decreases it because I get less sensitive to "weird-looking" things happening, and I get so many messages asking "was this you that tried to log in?" that I could never tell if something problematic was happening or not.
• I've tried changing between Plaid and MX and they are both a problem.

It might be RBC, but I have the impression that all Canadian banks are a disaster in this area. I used to live in the US and YNAB was seamless there. In Canada, I'm not sure if there is any point in continuing to try - it's like they are actively trying to keep me from managing my money responsibly.

There has to be some better answer.